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SESSION B.5 : EXERCISE

THE PROGRAMME TREE.

Many news stories, particularly if they are informational only, can elicit a weary "so what?" from the listeners.
Explanatory stories have the potential to more fully engage the listener as you can help him or her to relate their own circumstances or concerns to the story.
As we noted in the exercise, the usual journalism of information, even when we can get it, encourages us to mistake knowing something about a topic for doing something about it.
We urgently need a more invigorated form of journalism, one that engages us in global and local issues and shows us links between them. That will encourage us to care about the plight of other humans across the planet showing us that it is in our own self-interest at least, to act to remedy these situations.

Make no apologies for being subjective; itís a human condition. Present the facts as best as you can, but care about the situation. And try to engage a jaded and overwhelmed audience in the drama of human life spread across the planet.
This approach could be termed 'advocacy journalism', and it can be criticised for becoming less objective. But it is based on recognition that we are all subjective beings and that our retelling of an event is inevitably coloured by our previous experiences and worldview.
You should begin a dialogue within your media project about how to develop this form of journalism, you could experiment with an array of tools to make your reporting more relevant and useful.
You could, for example, consider providing a story with an 'empowerment point' which is a segment that contains information that tells listeners where to call for help, who to contact to become involved in an action, or where some future related events will occur. This segment could be preceded by a distinct tone, or chime to alert the listener to its arrival.

In writing each story, ask what information does this story contain that will engage the listener? Standard media training will encourage you to structure a story to achieve this effect so that a story about the local council raising charges for a range of services, won't hold the listeners if you start with an account of the meeting and those in attendance before getting to the increased charges. Give the end result first, you will be told, to get their attention then back track for details. But in relation to our Programme Tree, this material would be the leaves, the trunk, if you wanted to expand the story, this would be the underlying economic situation which forced these changes, while the roots if you care to dig, will explain macro-global-economic trends.